Weekend on the Taff

Spent this weekend fishing with my good mate Nick on what I now consider to be my home waters of the Lower Taff. 

Saturday

On Saturday the water was still a bit high (a good foot over summer average, which is better than most rivers in the UK at the moment) so we hit the Rhondda which flows into the Taff at Pontypridd. As I had over indulged in Bourbon the night before we didn’t start until 3pm, but we had an awesome evening session. The fish were rising when we arrived and we noticed that Terry was already working his way up the pool so stopped for a chat, he told us of a monster that he put at over 4lbs in the stretch below us; apparently he had tried most of his dries over it and the fish would nose them, ignore them and then carry on rising to the pale wateries, dark olives and blue wings coming down in good numbers.

Nick and I decided we should rest that fish and go back for him in the evening and watched Terry fish for a few minutes. A phone call then had Terry leaving in a hurry as he had forgotten an appointment with his lady (he has his priorities all wrong) so Nick and I started to fish up through the stretch.

It was one of those days where there were so many naturals coming down that the fish wouldn’t move for a good imitation, instead I sized up from the 16’s and 18’s to a size 12 sun-fly. This big mouthful was enough to grab their attention and we were soon rising a lot of fish all in the 0.5-1 lb range, good fish for the tributary. I have no pics of the fish as I had left my camera so will keep this day’s write up short.

Our evening on the Rhondda was cut short when she proved that the river itself could be as contagious as the fishing, when the heavy rain comes here overflows open in to the river and after I was hit by a sanitary towel we took that as a cue to leave.

We finished the evening on a good dry fly pool on the Taff above Ponty and had a good evening catching a load more fish on the dries, spinners this time as the blue winged olives had come back as claret spinners and the fish were feeding heavily on them.

The dry flies I used on Saturday are real staples in my box and I will do a post on them soon, the sun-fly and jinglers in particular always seem to elicit a rise from a stubborn fish, although I haven’t tested them on a river apart from the Taff yet.

Sunday

I remembered the camera on Sunday so we can have a pic post to make up for the dire lack of pics from the previous day. There were far fewer fish rising on Sunday but we both managed to catch our first and last fish on the dry with a few in between when we reached a good dry fly pool, again the jingler and sun-fly producing the goods. The rest of the many fish landed were on jigs, mainly drab brown-olives or bright red tags depending on the depth and colour, murkier the water more blingy the fly. Again the size of average fish was staggering and must have been approaching ¾ of  a pound, this average was seriously helped by Nick landing the beast below.

Good weekend had by all on the Taff I think.

Dan